/*
 *  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
 *  or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
 *  distributed with this work for additional information
 *  regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
 *  to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 *  "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
 *  with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *  
 *    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *  
 *  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
 *  software distributed under the License is distributed on an
 *  "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
 *  KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
 *  specific language governing permissions and limitations
 *  under the License. 
 *  
 */

package org.apache.directory.api.asn1;


/**
 * <p>
 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. This is the sister
 * interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic
 * interface.
 * </p>
 * <p>
 * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the
 * codec package.
 * </p>
 * <p>
 * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.
 * </p>
 * 
 * @author <a href="mailto:dev@directory.apache.org">Apache Directory Project</a>
 */
public interface Decoder
{

    /**
     * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the
     * implementation of this interface will try to cast the Object parameter to
     * the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a
     * {@link java.lang.ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw
     * a DecoderException.
     * 
     * @param object an object to "decode"
     * @return a 'decoded" object
     * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons.
     * Some good candidates are that the parameter passed to this method is null, a param 
     * cannot be cast to the appropriate type for a specific encoder.
     */
    Object decode( Object object ) throws DecoderException;
}